GLENDALE, Ariz. — The Strome brothers — Ryan, Dylan and Matt — have a group text message string that they use every day and the topic of conversation is rarely hockey. Partly because it’s so hard for the three siblings in two different leagues to follow each other’s games.

Ryan, 25, plays for the Edmonton Oilers. Dylan, 21 is a center for the Arizona Coyotes who played the Flyers Monday and will finish the home-and-home series Thursday in Philadelphia. Matt, 19, was a Flyers fourth-round pick in 2017 and is in his last season playing for the Hamilton Bulldogs of the Ontario Hockey League. Because so few are televised, his games are the toughest to catch.

“We went to the Memorial Cup last year, me and Ryan with our family, so that was pretty cool to watch,” Dylan said. Matt’s Bulldogs lost in the CHL championship series to the Acadie-Bathurst Titan. “I hadn’t seen Matt play in two years. It was cool to watch him play. We pretty much leave each other alone. We like to figure out hockey-wise for ourselves. Ryan let me do that and I kind of let Matt do that and we sort of just figure it out and we’re always there for support if one guy’s struggling but we try to keep it positive and I think that’s been working for us.”

Dylan and Ryan were first-round picks and Matt had a similar upside, but his skating was deemed such a deficiency that he fell to the fourth round. The Flyers are confident they can help him improve in that area. After all, Oskar Lindblom was similarly criticized around the time he was drafted, and he was one of the best players in the Flyers’ first three games of their road trip.

So far this season, Matt has six goals and 19 points in 17 games. He signed his entry-level contract back in March so next year he’ll turn pro like his brothers. He can pull from some of the experiences his brothers had because their careers haven’t been a smooth upward trend. Ryan was traded by the New York Islanders for Jordan Eberle last summer. Dylan has bounced around for the past two seasons between the Coyotes, the OHL’s Erie Otters, the Tucson Roadrunners of the American Hockey League.

“Obviously the NHL’s a real tough game,” Dylan said. “I haven’t played a full season yet, not even close. I’m trying to find my way still and I feel like he’s gonna get there one day. He’s a good fit, a prototypical Philly player. We all thought he was gonna go a little higher in the draft and he kind of slipped down. I think that’s motivated him a lot and he’s having a pretty good year in Hamilton. They have a younger team but they’re still pretty good.

“I think if you talk to Matt’s teammates, they say he’s really loud and outgoing and funny and talkative and stuff but around our house he’s not too loud. He’s the quiet one.”

They’re a long way from playing street hockey in Mississauga, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto where the Stromes and McLeods (Michael was a first-round pick of the New Jersey Devils in 2016, Ryan a second-round pick of Edmonton in 2018 and oldest brother Matt is a senior at Canisius College in Buffalo) were good friends and played together so that they could face off against their brothers.

“So we were always getting into fights or someone was crying or whatever,” Dylan said. “Usually someone ends up getting yelled at and it’s always one person’s fault, but we had fun. We were very competitive brothers and we always wanted to win. I think that’s what still drives us today to still be good is our competitiveness to win.”

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Gritty, the new Philadelphia Flyers mascot, was introduced to fans via this promotional video.
Ryan Cormier, The News Journal

Neuvirth on IR, Lyon recalled

Michal Neuvirth left the Flyers’ road trip back on Saturday when he headed back to Philadelphia to have doctors assess yet another “lower-body injury.” He is day-to-day, according to general manager Ron Hextall, and should be able to return this week. Meantime, the Flyers put him on injured reserve and recalled Alex Lyon from the Lehigh Valley Phantoms because Brian Elliott got hurt, too.

In Sunday’s practice, Elliott got barreled over by Travis Konecny and was down on the ice holding his head for a while.

Remember back at the start of training camp when the Flyers thought they had too many goalies? Turns out that wasn’t the case.

The power of a penalty kill

While the Flyers have had a problem for the last half decade on the penalty kill, they faced a Coyotes team Monday which is terrific at it. They came into the game with the league’s second-ranked penalty kill and led the NHL with seven shorthanded goals. They are the fifth team in NHL history to score seven in the first 12 games of a season. They had also scored a shorty in four straight games before Monday’s.

“There’s gotta be some structure and belief,” Coyotes coach Rick Tocchet, a former Flyers great, explained. “There’s certain tweaks, like do the defensemen play to the middle of the net or the strong side, if you look at any penalty kill there’s different positional stuff but I think it’s a lot of reads. You have to make a quick read as a penalty killer and sometimes you might make the wrong read and it’s about how you recover. I think it’s more reads than anything. This year, knock on wood, we’ve been making some really good reads and it’s helped us.”